"Eating"
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
            For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL
                          July 6, 1991

    As someone always on the lookout for films that might be
especially interesting to women, I had to go see Harry Jaglom's
new film "Eating." It is a film that has an all woman cast and
purports to be about women and their relationship to food.  I say
"purports to be" because if ever there was a film whose real
subject is different from its ostensible one this is it.   Oh,
it's about eating, all right, but it's also about these women's
feelings about aging, about men, about one another, but more than
anything else it's about Harry Jaglom's (rather traditional)
views about women.

     Lots of films these days use filmmaking developed by
feminist filmmakers in the 1970s.  This film, for example,
employs a pseudodocumentary style reminiscent of the films
feminist Michele Citron made such as "Daughter Rite" in which the
improvisatory style of acting creates the illusion you're seeing
"real women" on the screen instead of actors.  We know "Eating"
is fiction, but it's structured around a French woman who's
making a documentary film, and much of what we see is ostensibly
through the eye of her camera which creates the illusion of
truth.  To further blur the lines between fiction and "reality"
many of the shots in which the characters speak of their
relationship to food are clearly improvised, and since some of
the characters are played by actresses whose personal lives we
know something about we think they're speaking about real people.
For example, when Mary Crosby's character talks about her
childhood it's almost impossible not to think of her as Bing and
Kathryn Crosby's daughter rather than as the character she plays
in the film.  Likewise, Frances Bergen's character's remarks
about her marriage lead inevitably to thoughts of her real life
husband Edgar Bergen and daughter Candace.  It's an extra arrow
in the filmmaker's quiver of tricks to make the audience believe
the truth of what they're seeing and hearing.

    There's not much plot here.  Helene is celebrating her 40th
birthday in her wealthy Los Angeles home by inviting two friends
who are celebrating their 30th and 50th birthdays to join her in
a group birthday party.  About 40 women come to the party--a
three tiered catered affair with a lunch buffet, an afternoon
birthday cake ritual, followed by dinner.  All the while Helene's
marriage to a Beverly HIlls psychiatrist is falling apart (he
doesn't appear but he phones a lot) and the French filmmaker
continues to interview the party guests about their feelings on
eating, favorite foods, eating disorders, and so on, in an effort
to come to grips with her own problems.  By the end of the day
Helene is grimly facing a future in which she will be alone for
the first time in her life, while the filmmaker is ready for the
first time not to be alone.

    I found this film strangely disturbing.  It does deal
graphically and, in some instances I think truthfully, with such
matters as bulimia and the effects of they way we are tyrannized
by societal norms of beauty.  But what I saw was an essentially
hostile portrait of this group of woman coupled with an
underlying valorization of traditional views.  The only woman in
the film who comes off looking sane and healthy is Frances
Bergen's character who lived a very traditional life and counsels
staying married no matter what you have to put up with.  The
others may be an accurate portrait of women who live on the
fringes of Hollywood, where obsession with thinness is even more
intense than in the rest of our society, but it is not a loving
portrait of these women.  Independence for Helene is something to
be resigned to rather than the first step toward transcendence.
For all its strenuous effort to make us believe we're seeing
"real women" this is not a feminist film.   Still, there is
enough of interest in it to warrant your going to see it.